We Wouldn’t Want To Be Simplistic And Naive, Now, Would We?

Our nation might be less divided, and our debates less poisonous, if more artists were capable of showing us the ironies, ambiguities and tragedies inherent in our politics — rather than comforting us with portraits of a world divided cleanly into good and evil.

Yes, the problem might be that we do not have artists capable of rendering contemporary architects of a war of aggression that was based on shoddy intelligence, ideological fervor and deceit in a sufficiently subtle, even-handed manner. If only Hollywood were better at portraying the depth and complexity of people who unleashed hell on a nation of 24 million people out of an absurd fear of a non-existent threat! Life is so unfair to warmongers, is it not? Then again, the reason our debates are so poisonous and our nation so divided might have something to do with the existence of utterly unaccountable members of the political class that can launch such a war, suffer no real consequences, and then reliably expect to be defended as “decent” and “well-intentioned” people who made understandable mistakes. The unfortunate truth of our existence is that villains do not have to come out of central casting for comic book movies. They are ordinary, “decent” people who commit grave errors and terrible crimes for any number of reasons. Many great evils have found their origins in a group’s belief that they were doing the right thing and were therefore entitled and permitted to use extraordinary means.

That said, I do agree that we should have a greater appreciation for ambiguity and complexity. Would that we had had more of this when the President was railing against an “axis of evil,” administration supporters were authoring absurdly-titled works called An End to Evil, and advocates of invasion were routinely claiming that anyone opposed to the war did not understand that evil existed in the world. Where was this discomfort with sharp “Manichean” divisons then? Where were the complaints against simplistic and naive “reductionism” of complex realities?

Perhaps more of a tragic sensibility would have held some of the delusions of war supporters in check. Perhaps they would have been less enthusiastic to start a war that did not have to happen. After all, the Iraq war was nothing if not a product of a comforting, false vision of a world cleanly divided into good and evil, in which “we” were liberators and “they” were villains, pure and simple. When “they” possess a weapon, it is a dire threat to all of mankind, but when “we” possess the weapon it is no problem at all. “Their” aggression is proof that they must be destroyed, while “our” aggression is evidence of our noble intentions. Of course, when opponents of the invasion attempted to hold our government to the same moral and legal standards the government invoked against Hussein, we were told that this was to engage in “moral equivalency” and “relativism.” There is nothing quite like the relativism of universal moral standards!

Perhaps one reason there is not much interest in exploring the tragic side of our politics is that Nemesis is ever-elusive. The ambition and pride of political leaders may lead to disaster, but the men whose ambition and pride fueled the calamity escape relatively unscathed. We have an abundance of hubris in our politics, and there are more than enough sins that invite punishment, but unlike the famous figures of tragedy our leaders never answer for what they have done. It is always “History” that is supposed to judge them. In the meantime, they walk away, and often enough they head off to a comfortable retirement. They remain unaccountable and surrounded by a small army of revisionists just waiting to rehabilitate their reputations in a few years’ time.

When that changes, perhaps we will have more complicated storytelling that does not simply vilify the people responsible for a great crime. However, since there will apparently be no accountability for our leaders in the real world, we may have to settle for the inadequate stories we have now.

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19 Responses to We Wouldn’t Want To Be Simplistic And Naive, Now, Would We?

“From Mark Twain’s ‘Gilded Age’ and Robert Penn Warren’s ‘All the King’s Men’ to their more recent imitators, our novelists have never been terribly interested in the actual challenges of political life. Instead, Lehmann suggested, they usually cast the entire mess as ‘a great ethical contaminant and task their protagonists with escaping its many perils with both their lives and their moral compasses intact.’”

Meanwhile, Republican (and Democratic) critics of Obama have taken into account “the actual challenges of political life?” LMAO! Maybe Douthat should have written an article about this being a HUMAN problem rather than writing another tired Republican indictment of Hollywood.

Everything you write is the plain and simple truth. Memories are short. All the given reasons to support the war have fallen over. What were once reasons are no more. Now we are given new reasons and are asked to forget the old reasons, to move on, our main regret that our dramatists aren’t up to providing us catharsis.
Watergate called down the law over a botched political B&E; Bill Clinton was impeached because he behaved like a weasel. We lay a country prostrate and our law is silent. I would say catharsis is the least of our problems.

No, he wasn’t. Clinton is in fact another example of a leader allowed to simply walk away from his bad behavior without any lasting consequences.

If Clinton had responded to the Lewinsky question by saying either…

A. It’s none of your business.

B. Yeah, she sucked me off. What of it?

and was then hounded into impeachment, it would have been one thing. But that’s not what happened. He lied and then he spent the better part of a year whoring out virtually his entire administration to support that lie. And no, it doesn’t matter that the lie was about sex. EVERYBODY always thinks they have a good reason to lie.

And the reason why this is important is because you cannot understand what happened under George W. Bush without recognizing the precedences set under Bill Clinton. Watergate established that if you get caught, you’re better off coming clean than trying to stonewall. Lewinsky established that if you get caught, lie your ass off, make it all about politics and never stop fighting…and you can get away with it. That’s the lesson George W. Bush took to heart when he went before the Beltway media and joked about not finding weapons of mass destruction. That’s the lesson his administration relied on when a war about WMD and terrorism was magically transformed into a war about democracy. that truth and morality and ethics and the law don’t matter. All that matters is doing whatever you want until someone stops you. And that’s the same lesson future Presidents, GOP and Dem, will put into practice as well.

Even before Watergate, the architects of Vietnam walked away unscathed by their disaster, Even when they knew early on that there was no hope of achieving their goals, American leadership still sent thousands of men to die so as not to appear weak. Vietnam is still littered with landmines, resulting in casualties to this day – and no one was held accountable.

Doctors have to carry substantial liability insurance in the event they make just one mistake. We have a political class that makes serial mistakes, and they suffer nothing for it, The fact that Iraq boosters in 2003 are now urging the same treatment to Iran in 2010 boggles my mind. That they are taken as “serious people” by the media establishment is even worse.

You’ve won a free dinner in Manhattan on me. You can pick any establishment you want except the few that have a multi-hundred minimum, but, since I have no idea how much a person can drink, let’s just agree no bottles of wine unless it comes out cheaper than glasses of house.

Mike Bunge, I disagree with your assertion that The Clenis was the precedent for GW Bush getting a pass. W was surrounded by people who had participated in Watergate and Iran-Contra (now THERE is a precedent) and had gotten off either scott-free or have since become darlings of the Right (how’s GGL doing these days?) or both. These fine fellows didn’t need to cast about for lessons on how to avoid responsibility – they wrote the textbook(s) on it. They didn’t need to look for an analogy between what they had done in Iraq (killing tens of thousands of people, squandering billions of dollars, and dragging our nation’s reputation through the mud), and to what Clinton had done (what was it that he did again? had sex or sumpin’ and lied about it?).

No, if you want REAL stonewalling about REAL lies, crimes, killings, and theft, there is no need to go outside the family. Bush had all the experts with actual experience right there in his administration. Compared to these fine fellows, Clinton was a piker.

You’ve proven Ross’s point in your first two sentences. “Ideological ferver”, “deceit”, “absurd fear”, and “non-existent threat” are politically-colored terms that you chose because of your political alignment, and that might have been shoveled in directly from a “Bush lied, people died” protest speech. Every one of them imputes an action you disagree with to an undisciplined, immoderate, cowardly, blind, or deceitful person. It is entirely speculation to say “ideological ferver” and “absurd fear” – you’ve never met any of these people and don’t know their minds or what they experienced.

You assume what Bush and his subordinates are like because of how much you dislike what they’ve done. It’s when authors write like you’ve just written that we get Oliver Stone movies, which you must enjoy when his position aligns with yours. But artists do well when they test assumptions about character; if they want to pass judgment and express their disdain for people they should just become bloggers.

The fear of Iraqi WMDs was absurd from the beginning. I doubt that most of the architects of the war genuinely feared this threat, but I’m taking the administration and and its supporters at their word that they pushed for the invasion for this reason. I’m not attempting to speculate about their “real” motives, because I can only guess at those. This is what they told the world, and if they believed what they said they were suffering from an irrational fear of a threat that some of us suspected all along never existed.

I don’t need to know any of these people to see that many of them were fueled by ideological fervor. That was obvious from their public statements. They told us that regime change in Iraq was going to usher in regional political transformation. Iraq would be the inspirational model that would lead to reform movements in neighboring lands. I’m not imputing anything to them. This is the nonsense they spouted for years. The war was supposed to have a “demonstration effect” that would terrify all U.S. enemies around the world. These were fantasies informed by an ideologically-distorted view of the world.

The administration and its supporters repeatedly endorsed the most ridiculous aspects of democratic peace theory. Bush repeatedly claimed that democracies do not war against one another. This is not true, and anyone not in thrall to fantasies of global revolution would be able to see that it isn’t true. Their ideological fervor culminated in the Second Inaugural, which was possibly the most lunatic political statement of the last century. If you were paying any attention for the last seven years, you would already know all this. So, please, spare me the Oliver Stone references.

I don’t assume that all architects of the war were “undisciplined, immoderate, cowardly, blind, or deceitful.” I think many of them were unwise and were blinded by a combination of arrogance and ideology. Some of them may have believed the false claims they were making. However, it is clear when Cheney said publicly that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program, he was grossly exaggerating what he thought he knew and was misleading the public. It is extremely tiresome to have to point these things out all this time later.

Ross seems to think that a big problem in our national political discourse is that we do not have filmmakers who are sympathetic enough to warmongers. I submit that the warmongers and their supporters might have more to answer for than Paul Greengrass when he makes a mediocre Iraq movie. So Ross made a bad argument. It was unfortunate, but it happens. It would be putting it mildly to say that your defense is not persuasive.

But do the Lords of War in fact
hate the world? That would be easy
to bear, if so. If they hated
their children and the flowers
that grow in the warming light,
that would be easy to bear. For then
we could hate the haters
and be right. What is hard
is to imagine the Lords of War
may love the things that they destroy.

Having read Douthat’s column, I’m actually surprising myself by defending him slightly here. I agree with most everything you wrote, Daniel, but I think the last line of Douthat’s, which you quote, was somewhat misguided and doesn’t go along with the rest of his column. The rest of his column was actually pretty likable, I thought: There were many complex reasons for going into Iraq; those reasons may make for better storytelling and are certainly worth studying on their own; current films aren’t doing it well.

Now, I believe that “Bush Lied, People Died.” But that’s more an effect than a cause. Why did Bush lie and why was it successful? That’s certainly worth exploring, just like Nazi Germany shouldn’t be reduced to “Hitler Evil, Germans Stupid.”

What set me off when I was writing last night, and what I think has bothered a lot of other people who have read the column, is that Ross did not acknowledge that the flaws he identifies in the films (and I don’t disagree that these flaws are there!) were flaws that members of the administration and their supporters had in spades. Indeed, these were the flaws that contributed to the disaster that he wants to have portrayed in a more complicated and sympathetic way in film. Ross objects to terrible simplifiers when it comes to storytelling, and that’s fine as far as it goes, but he really needs to take account of the much greater damage the terrible simplifiers did in actually waging the war.

If Paul Greengrass makes a heavy-handed tendentious film filled with caricatures, maybe his reputation as a director takes a hit and some people waste their money on a mediocre movie. If people in government and the media have the same flaws, it results in the launch of an unnecessary war that wrecks an entire country, kills thousands and adversely affects the lives of millions. Which seems like the bigger problem that deserves more criticism? Which one is more responsible for the state of our political debate?

The line at the end didn’t have to be there, but once it is there it compounds the mistake of leaving out that acknowledgment. I think Ross wanted to argue that most movies about the Iraq war are mediocre and suffer from poor characterization and political moralizing, but for whatever reason had to try to make an observation about Iraq war filmmaking into a statement about the national political discourse while blithely re-stating a pretty conventional explanation for the Iraq war as the correct one. It would go a long way towards helping his argument against mediocre Iraq war films if he could acknowledge explicitly that the “Bush lied, people died” claim really is part of what happened.

As it happens, I think Ross is partly right that it is too easy to say that the war is solely the responsibility of its architects. A majority of the public did back the initial invasion, and a lot of fair-weather hawks have long since abandoned what they once supported. (It could be that Green Zone didn’t do well at the box office because most of these people aren’t interested in being reminded how easily they were duped.) Even so, the war’s architects have the lion’s share of the responsibility for what happened, and they have remained pretty much completely unaccountable.

It’s a bit like seeing someone get away with murder and then having someone tell you not only that we are all obliged to be fair-minded and sympathetic to him afterwards, but also that he didn’t really do it or if he did it was for the best of reasons. There might be a greater willingness to see the villain’s side of the story if we could all acknowledge that he was a villain and deserves to pay a penalty for what he did.

As pointed out in other forums, Green Zone was rated R, while the Bourne movies were rated PG-13, which generally sell more tickets. Also, United 93, a Greengrass film, did poorly at the box office, but was nominated for Best Picture. Does that mean that audiences did not want to see a true-to-the-facts film as well? ‘World Trade Center”, Oliver Stone’s melodrama starring Nicolas Cage, also did not sell a lot of tickets.

It could be that audiences are more comfortable with such films once enough time has passed. Or, maybe Nazis are better screen villians than Arabs?

…the war’s architects have the lion’s share of the responsibility for what happened, and they have remained pretty much completely unaccountable.

This is the larger point, amending it only slightly. They have been entirely unaccountable.
Any careful reader of the NY Times in the year prior to the onset of the war saw that this was a planned pre meditated invasion. I recall a Weekly Standard cover from some time after Bush became president, well before the invasion, that blared “On to Iraq.” I cancelled my subscription forthwith.
We are a nation of laws. We invaded a country and laid it waste. The aftermath has established sufficient probable cause to believe that the reasons we we went to war were objectively invalid and potentially willfully misleading. One would think that a responsible government would concern itself with laying bare precisely what happened. Disgracefully this has not happened, and while the lack of interesting or therapeutic art is to be lamented, I would prefer to see the wheels of justice begin to grind. A historic blunder involving the entire apparatus of National Security should not be left to people who can smell the garbage but have no means of doing anything about it.
Well done, Daniel.

In that Mr. Douthat used a Shakespearean analogy to explain how the nation was affected after being attacked on 9-11, is insulting to anyone who has ever read, enjoyed, or understood Wm. Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s comment on this episode of our history, would be more along the lines of a description of what the insidiously evil folk did to keep Iraq front and center after 9-11, but he of course would have done it employing excellent communication by the main and supporting characters; how these folks were able to dupe the majority of rubes known in modern times as the general public into supporting their folly, and would conclude with those evil folks paying the price for their evil. Certainly no one has paid the price of this folly in Iraq, and I highly doubt Mr. Cheney and his cabal ever believed Iraq was a threat.
Additionally, it feels like a sick joke, to lay the responsibility for the tenor of current political discourse on artists. Artists merely reflect what is happening in any society, currently.
Okay, rant over, nice article Mr. Larison.

It could be that audiences are more comfortable with such films once enough time has passed. Or, maybe Nazis are better screen villains than Arabs?

I think these movies remind Americans of the incredible, morally indefensible, wounded collective vanity with which they behaved for two or three years after 9/11. Paranoia, with its implicitly assigned extraordinary selfimportance, is one of the major forms that vanity took.

It’s a vanity Americans haven’t yet been able to explain to themselves, which is to say they haven’t discovered a way to rationalize it away.

MBunge:
“No, he wasn’t. Clinton is in fact another example of a leader allowed to simply walk away from his bad behavior without any lasting consequences.”

If what happened to Clinton happened to Bush, it’d have been far, far less than Bush deserved, and far, far worse than what actually happened to Bush. I do understand that some people, even after 8 years of happy-happy joy-joy under Bush, have not recovered from Our Long National Nightmare of Peace and Prosperity, but don’t expect us to have sympathy for you.

“You’ve proven Ross’s point in your first two sentences. “Ideological ferver”, “deceit”, “absurd fear”, and “non-existent threat” are politically-colored terms that you chose because of your political alignment, and that might have been shoveled in directly from a “Bush lied, people died” protest speech. Every one of them imputes an action you disagree with to an undisciplined, immoderate, cowardly, blind, or deceitful person. It is entirely speculation to say “ideological ferver” and “absurd fear” – you’ve never met any of these people and don’t know their minds or what they experienced. ”

I’m sorry for your misfortune, and hope that you make a full recovery – I can’t even begin to imagine what the physical therapy must be like after spending all of those years in a coma.

Among many other changes you’ll find that the Internet has developed greatly during your coma. Some people can help you find the archives of various magazines and newspapers from the ‘run up to the Iraq War’ to give you an idea of what ““Ideological ferver”, “deceit”, “absurd fear”, and “non-existent threat”” actually are.

Oh – don’t worry; people will understand ‘Iraq War’ to be that war that happened during your coma; you don’t have to say ‘Second Iraq War’, or ‘IWII’.